My Heart Melts for Valentines Day

Every few months I clean out the crayon bin. It's a fairly large box about 8x6x4". This is where all the hundreds crayons go. A lot of kids = a lot of crayons. I usually stock up when the Crayola's are .20 a box before public school starts. As many as I buy, we never seems to make it through until the next year's sale. So, instead of throwing out those tiny crayon bits we recycle them into new ones. It's a fairly easy process, if a bit messy. This time, in correspondance with Valentine's Day, we made heart shaped ones.

They came out so pretty I couldn't help but take a bunch of pictures of them posing.

The best way to do this is with a pan or mold you won't ever use for making food in again. Yes, I had to buy new cupcake tins the last time I did this. Learn from my mistakes. I bought these heart shaped ones at Target for $2.50 for the pair.

The kids helped me pick out all the broken pieces from the box.

Then we sorted them by color palette and broke them into even smaller pieces. The hardest part was getting off the paper but if you use a knife and cut them the long way it makes the process much simpler.

We preheated the oven to 250 and placed the silicone heart molds on a cookie tray for stabilization. Then set the timer for 10 minutes.

Some colors take longer to melt. So we added another 10 minutes to the batch after poking the larger pieces with a toothpick, careful not to mix them too much.

After they were melted we set them on the counter in the tray to cool. When they were hard we popped them out. The silicone made it easy.

A few got packaged into a set of five in cute little see through bags that will be sent to our cousins. Making crayons new again isn't hard and it's a great project for the kiddos. Plus they're just pretty.